Not long after President Barack Obama gave a speech outlining his plan for attacking climate change, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, appeared on Fox News to discuss the future of energy and the environment.

"We’ve had nine inches of sea-level rise since the 1920s," said Wasserman Schultz in the June 28 interview with Tucker Carlson. "What that means is that communities like mine in South Florida and coastal communities all across the country are facing dangerous sea-level rise, which will ultimately cause homes to be under water in just a few short years."

In this item, we won’t analyze her projections for future sea-level rises; such estimates are based on a variety of theoretical models and come with lots of uncertainty attached. However, we did wonder whether Wasserman Schultz was correct about past changes — specifically, whether South Florida has "had nine inches of sea-level rise since the 1920s."

The ruling: Her claim essentially matches the data collected by the National Oceantic and Atmospheric Administration. While there is considerable uncertainty about the future course of sea-level rises, Wasserman Schultz’s estimate of the historical rise appears to be on target.

A Big Sugar ad campaign has struck a sour note with
environmentalists.

In fliers mailed to thousands of South Florida homes and a
television spot, the industry touts legislation signed by Gov. Rick Scott in
May that extends a $25-an-acre tax on cane fields to help pay for an $880
million expansion of projects to reduce the flow of farm pollution flowing in
the Everglades, as a "historic partnership" with environmentalists
and the state that will "put the final phase of restoration into
place."

The ad boasts that "smart farming techniques" have
helped preserve the Everglades and proclaims farmers the "largest private
funders of Everglades restoration" with
some $400 million invested in the effort to date.

The state's three largest growers -- Florida Crystals, U.S.
Sugar and the Florida Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative -- bankrolled the ad
targeting key communities and residents in South Florida,
said Brian Hughes, president of Tallahassee-based Meteoric Media Strategies,
which created the ad. He wouldn't discuss the cost or say how many people will
get fliers but called it a "modest" effort.

In December, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection laid off 58 employees to cut costs. Several who were fired went public with allegations that the DEP is easing regulations on industrial plants and developers that could have far-ranging environmental consequences for years to come. And environmental groups are threatening to sue over lax water protections.

Yet on Friday, the seemingly embattled agency was held up as an example of good government by a legislative budget committee that awarded it permission to dole out more than $500,000 in bonuses.

Recipients will be “high-performing” employees who, among other things, were deemed to have improved customer service and reduced the time it takes to issue permits, a criteria that conservatives found refreshing and environmental advocates found vexing.

“Everywhere I go I hear my constituents tell me how efficient the agency is, whether they are for or against a permit,” said. Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine. “The agency is doing its job and this vote will award that efficiency.”

“The thing that bothers me is when they start emphasizing speed, they threaten to turn the DEP into a Jiffy Lube,” said Eric Draper, executive director of Florida Audubon, who was in Tampa and couldn’t attend the meeting. “If they’re stressing that employees to get a job done quickly, rather than do the best job they can, we lose the guarantee that the DEP is properly focused on the environment.”

The U.S. Supreme Court gave the family of a Central Florida landowner – as well as property owners and developers across the state and country – a significant victory on Tuesday with a ruling that stands to make it tougher and more expensive for government agencies to protect the nation’s dwindling wetlands.

In a 5 to 4 decision, the court found that the St. Johns River Water Management District had imposed excessive demands on Coy Koontz Sr., who was denied a permit to build on a 15-acre plot outside of Orlando unless he offset or “mitigated” for paving over wetlands by restoring wetlands owned by the district several miles away.

Koontz died several years ago but his son, Coy Koontz Jr., said the family was ecstatic at winning a land-use legal battle dating back nearly two decades and giving other landowners “a bigger stick” to fight similar cases in the future.

“As my wife said, it certainly vindicates my father’s decision to take this fight on,” Koontz said during a media conference call organized by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a private property rights advocacy group that represented the family in the case. More here.

Florida Legislators used a bill to change wetlands regulations to block a lawsuit against the state for approving two no-bid, 20-year lease agreements with sugar and vegetable farmers.

The leases were approved by the governor and Cabinet in January and are now being challenged in court by the Florida Wildlife Federation, which alleges the leases allow the sugar growers to continue to farm without reducing their pollution levels.

The provision was added to HB 999, a wide-ranging bill that changes environmental regulations. The House voted 106-10 late Friday while the Senate voted 39-1 and sent the measure to the governor.

The sugar industry said in a statement that the legislation was needed to "avoid
obstructionist litigation from some extreme environmental activists" and to complete the state's clean-up efforts that are part of the Everglades settlement legislators also ratified.

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham appealed to
legislators to reject the bill on Thursday. Graham, a member of the Florida Conservation Coalition, said it was clearly intended to end the litigation.

The Senate on Thursday stripped the bill of other provisions opposed by environmentalists , including a three-year ban on local fertilizer ordinances and a measure to prevent local governments from imposing local wetlands regulations.

A last-ditch effort by South Florida lawmakers to keep millions of dollars flowing to private tutoring companies suffered a resounding defeat on Wednesday, giving Florida school districts control over $100 million in federal education money for the first time in a decade.

It happened when a pair of Miami-Dade lawmakers tried to attach funding for subsidized tutoring into a fast-tracked bill that would expand online learning.
Their fellow senators cried foul, citing an investigation by The Tampa Bay Times that showed criminals were profiting from the controversial program.

“What’s happening this year is we’re having students that are not being served,” said Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee. “I don’t want to go and read some of the newspaper articles on my desk. Remember, there were rapists. There were child abusers. There were thieves. In my hometown, what we call hoodlums and thugs.”

Last year Montford supported a bill that had continued the tutoring through the end of this school year. The measure, which passed late in the session, continued a private tutoring initiative begun by the George W. Bush administration in 2001 — a program meant to help the poorest kids in the nation’s worst schools.

In Florida, supplemental educational services, as it was known, gave rise to a booming for-profit industry that has fought fiercely the past two years to retain its funding.

In a series published in February, the Times revealed that lax state oversight allowed criminals to form companies and earn tax dollars tutoring needy kids. The newspaper also showed that companies repeatedly caught overbilling have continued to operate unchecked by state regulators.

Every year during the Legislative session in Tallahassee, state Rep. Jimmy Patronis does two things:

He
organizes a day for everyone to wear seersucker suits. And he pushes a
bill to change Florida’s environmental regulations, like the one that
passed the House last week blocking local governments from protecting
thousands of acres of wetlands.

Patronis, R-Panama City, is the
man who gives environmental activists nightmares — a charming and savvy
lawmaker convinced that Florida would be better off if government would
get out of the way and let businesses boost the economy.

“I can’t say enough good things about him,” said Frank Matthews,
who lobbies on behalf of developers, phosphate miners, boat
manufacturers, sugar growers, power companies and a garbage company. “He
couldn’t be more accommodating. That’s the appealing thing to me.” More from Tampa Bay Times' Craig Pittman here.

For the second day in a row, the virtual education bill by Sen. Jeff Brandes (SB 904) has been postponed in the upper chamber.

Don't take it as a sign that the bill is in trouble, Brandes said Thursday.

"We're working on some amendments," the St. Petersburg Republican said.

Brandes also may be waiting on budget negotiations to come to a close. The House and Senate are still at odds over how to fund virtual education.

The Brandes bill would allow private virtual learning providers from outside of state to qualify for public dollars. It would also allow students to receive credits for some massive open online courses, or MOOCs, among other provisions.

Its House companion, sponsored by Rep. Manny Diaz, Jr., has already passed out of the lower chamber.

No one knows if Florida is going to be the next frontier for the new generation of oil and gas drilling known as fracking, but state legislators say — just in case — it’s time to write rules to require disclosure of the controversial technology.

The Florida House on Wednesday is expected to pass a bill that will require companies to disclose what chemicals they use when they explore for oil and gas using the controversial extraction process.

Fracking uses hydraulic fracturing technology to inject water, sand and chemicals underground to create fractures in rock formations. Oil and gas is released through the fissures and is captured by wells, built at the sites. Environmentalists warn that the chemical makeup of the fluid that is pumped into the ground could contaminate groundwater and release harmful pollutants, such as methane, into the air.

"The Fracturing Chemical Usage Disclosure Act," sponsored by Rep. Ray Rodriques, R-Estero, would require the state Division of Resource Management to set up an online chemical registry for owners and operators of wells, service companies, and suppliers that use hydraulic fracturing.

The bill also requires the information to be posted on the web site, FracFocus.org, an online clearinghouse run by the Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. More here.

A pair of bills now steamrolling through the Florida House and Senate have drawn such strong objections from environmental groups that former Sen. Bob Graham flew to Tallahassee this week to lobby against them.

The two bills — HB 999 sponsored by Rep. Jimmy Patronis and SB 1684 by Sen. Thad Altman — are packed with provisions relating to sugar company leases in the Everglades, making it easier to wipe out wetlands and limiting the power of water districts to control pumping.

Why bring in Graham? Because "there's a whole big army of 40 or 50 lobbyists working on the other side," explained Estus Whitfield of the Florida Conservation Coalition. By comparison "the environmental voice has been a little chirp in the distance."

Graham said he got involved because the two bills "don't advance any interest of the public, just special interests."